CuttingEdge - Fall 2021

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Goddard Scientists Teach Algorithms to Detect Patterns in Data for Future Ocean World Studies Probes sent to investigate ocean worlds like Saturn’s moon Enceladus and Jupiter’s Europa will collect vast amounts of data, and may need to make autonomous decisions in real time about what warrants a closer look. Dr. Bethany Theiling, an Early Career geoscientist at Goddard, hopes to solve the problem of big data as well as communications constraints that come with the territory of investigating planets millions of miles away. These probes will not be able to depend too much on the decision-making or data analysis of human controllers here on Earth.

worlds they hope to visit are much farther away than a Goddard laboratory, which creates the problem of communicating to the spacecraft with limited bandwidth. “The problem is the spacecraft are so far away that the actual data rates and latency are a big limiting factor in what the spacecraft can do.” said James MacKinnon, Goddard artificial intelligence and machine learning researcher.

To start, she simulates oceans of data in the lab. “When I go in the lab, I actually make other worlds there,” Theiling said. “I make oceans that we’ve never even been to. Then I try to figure out if we could determine what those oceans are actually made of and how hard that might be.”

An AI-powered probe, however, could conduct preliminary onboard analysis in order to prioritize transmission of the most important data back to Earth first. The spacecraft would decipher the collected data in real time, determining what specific data points should be sent back for further research, what aspects of that data can remain cached on the spacecraft, and where the spacecraft should turn its focus to learn more.

These oceans that Theiling and her team build in their lab are vital to the construction of algorithms that can detect, analyze, and define data. The real

This is where machine learning becomes useful. Theiling and MacKinnon are currently teaching machine learning algorithms how to decipher Photo credit: NASA/Rebecca Roth

cuttingedge • goddard’s emerging technologies

Volume 18 • Issue 1 • Fall 2021

Bethany Theiling works with a mass spectrometer in her lab.

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www.nasa.gov/gsfctechnology


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